Full-throttle kidnapping thriller, with sufficiently neck-wrenching zigs and zags. The pivotal zig (or zag) is the underdiscussed decision to turn the two-million-dollar ransom into a two-million-dollar reward: a tempting carrot for the criminal turncoat. Mel Gibson, perhaps setting his sights on the Best Actor Oscar after salting away the Best …
Ron Howard, bloodied by the flopping of Cinderella Man but apparently unbowed, returns to the based-on-a-true-story sports movie. Here, he's gone to exotic, fleshy '70s Europe and the world of Formula One, where every race carries with it a 20 percent chance of death. Beautiful, brash British bad-boy James Hunt …
An imperious gunman (his creed: "I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on"), the last of a vanishing species, faces the prospect of weeks in bed, in pain, and in delirium with a terminal cancer, and decides instead to stage a farewell …
Race car rivals! In a film not directed by Ron Howard! With Noah Wylie as the guy who decides whether or not to put Snake and Mongoose stickers on Hot Wheels cars!
There was, of course, no need for this story to be told. Some might even argue that there was a need for it not to be told, so that some shred of mystery could be preserved in a franchise that devoted three films to unveiling a Dark Father as a …
Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan painted himself into a corner with The Sixth Sense, and has climbed the walls ever since: Unbreakable, Signs, and now this. His outsized initial success seems to have given him an inflated sense of self-importance, an inflamed sense of mission: not simply to top the sensationalism …
Disney’s animated arm wrestles with race relations. Here, that means predators and prey: formerly enemies (the film requires you to resist any temptation to use the modifier “natural”), they have now evolved to the point of living as peaceful neighbors in an urban metropolis. Of course, out in the sticks, …